TRANSMEDIAL MIGRATIONS:

ITALIAN LITERATURE TRANSFORMED AND TRANSPORTED

Except for a small group of poetry lovers and professional Italianists,
the surname Bertolucci is today linked to Bernardo, the film director,
and not to Attilio, his father, the poet. This state of affairs
has little to do with talent; instead it has a lot to do with
the different media through which father and son express themselves
(T. O'Neill 133). There are few readers (especially of poetry)
and many film-goers. (There are even more watchers of television.)
Because of this, Italy's cultural image abroad has been fashioned
more by its cinema than by its literature. Post-war Italian cinema
has been acclaimed critically and has achieved a good measure
of commercial success abroad. It has also been very influential
in the evolution of the medium itself. The films of Rossellini,
De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini, Antonioni, Fellini, and Bertolucci
are not only seen abroad, but also studied. The impact of Italian
cinema abroad is an important subject which merits separate treatment.
Here I shall limit myself to a small portion of that vast topic,
namely, how the translation of an Italian literary text (old or
new) from print into film (or video) affects the diffusion of
that text as well as others by the same author.

a. Cinema: Literature in the Reel World

Most Italian literary texts adapted for the screen have been Italian
productions, and the great majority of these were never distributed
outside Italy. Those that were were usually released with subtitles,
thus automatically limiting the potential audience to a "reading"
public. Most countries do not have the same passion as Italy for
dubbing foreign films, an activity which has become a veritable
industry in Italy. Some, like Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette
(Bicycle Thieves, 1948) based on Luigi Bartolini's 1946
novel of the same title, managed to overcome this obstacle. The
film won rave reviews and the Academy Award for the best foreign
film that year, and soon came to be considered a classic of Italian
Neo-Realist cinema. Artistically, the film overshadows the novel,
and has effectively replaced it as a point of reference. Nonetheless,
it produced what we might call the "rebound effect":
it led to the translation into English of the novel in 1952. Since
then, the novel has been republished twice (1964 and 1972). None
of Bartolini's other works has been translated into English and
it is very unlikely Ladri di biciclette would have been,
had it not been for the film.

The practice of co-producing what amounts essentially to an Italian
film (with an Italian script, director, and cast) with one or
more foreign countries has guaranteed these films (and the texts
on which they are based) a larger audience. However, in order
for a film to make it big, it must penetrate the large and lucrative
American market. Two movies adapted from novels by Moravia have
followed this itinerary and have met with success. The first is
La Ciociara (Two Women, 1960), an Italian-French
co-production, also directed by Vittorio De Sica. This film won
Sophia Loren an Academy Award and turned her into an international
star. The other is Il conformista (The Conformist,
1969), an Italian-French-West German co-production, directed by
Bernardo Bertolucci. It should be noted that in both these cases
the novels had already been translated into English, The Conformist
as early as 1952, Two Women in 1958. However, the movies
provoked renewed interest in the novels. Penguin republished The
Conformist shortly before the appearance of the movie (1968)
and Two Women shortly after the film's release (1961).
Since then, they have been republished several times; and the
movies without doubt contributed to Moravia's popularity in America,
thus helping to boost the sales of his other novels.

An Italian-West German co-production, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
(1970), adapted from Giorgio Bassani's novel and directed once
again by Vittorio De Sica, followed a similar pattern. The novel
had been translated in 1965 but was republished by Penguin in
1969 in anticipation of the film's release. It has since been
re-issued several times. However, this film is of interest to
us primarily because of the polemic it provoked, a polemic which
brings into focus several issues which are relevant to the topic
at hand. First, a film based on a literary text is a separate
and distinct aesthetic object, identified more with the film's
director and stars than with the author of the text at its origin.
Moreover, in the translation-transcodification-from print into
celluloid, several compromises dictated by the radically different
nature of the two media are necessary. It was these compromises
that Bassani was unwilling to accept; he objected to changes to
the script on which he himself had worked, and ultimately withdrew
his name from the list of writing credits. Ugo Pirro was brought
in to revise the script, which was nominated for but did not win
an Academy Award (Il cinema italiano d'oggi 101-2).

What is at stake here is more than the issue of philological precision;
it is the degree to which the writer-intellectual is willing to
accept the risks of involvement in mass culture. Moravia, as a
writer and intellectual, was always ready to compromise and openly
embraced mass culture. This stance and attitude guaranteed him
popular success. In terms of Eco's celebrated (if somewhat elusive)
distinction in Apocalittici e integrati, Moravia's position
approaches that of the "integrated" intellectual; he
is willing to accept mass culture, if not to celebrate it. On
the other hand, although Bassani is far from being an "apocalyptic"
intellectual - one who abhors and shuns mass culture - he is,
nonetheless, much more hesitant about it and sensitive to how
it can appropriate and transform one's work.

The dilemma is not insoluble; there is another path to follow.
Pasolini took this route: he realized both the great potential
film had to transmit cultural values and the risks involved in
having someone else translate your vision, so from a poet and
novelist he became a filmmaker. He wrote and directed his own
films: the scripts he prepared from scratch or adapted from his
own work (e.g. Teorema) or that of others, among them Boccaccio
and Chaucer. To be sure, his Decameron (1971), which uses
the Ciappelletto (1.1) and Giotto (6.5) stories to frame a selection
of Boccaccio's tales, has as much to do with Boccaccio (but for
radically different reasons) as Boccaccio '70. The latter
is a 1962 film anthology directed by Fellini, Visconti, De Sica,
and Monicelli. It includes four modern stories which Boccaccio
might have written, on an off day. Nonetheless, the film was immensely
successful abroad, in part because of the Boccaccio connection
established by the title. The same may be said of Pasolini's Decameron,
although by 1971 Pasolini had already established his reputation
abroad as a prominent filmmaker, if not a writer. His relatively
small but dedicated Anglo-American public was already familiar
with Accattone (1960), his first feature film, The Gospel
According to St. Matthew (1964), and Teorema (1968).
His Una vita violenta (1959) was only translated in 1968
on the heels of his success as a filmmaker. Subsequently, several
of his other literary works, including Ragazzi di vita
(1955), were translated. The present intense interest in Pasolini
in the Anglo-American world is due to a number of factors: his
sexual orientation (the rise of gay studies); his Marxist political
stance; his tragic death (which contributed to defining his public
persona as an outspoken outcast); his production as a filmmaker.
All of these factors, but especially the last, have led to a rediscovery,
or better discovery, abroad of Pasolini the writer (Rumble and
Testa, Gatt-Rutter).

Italian literature has not been a magnet for Hollywood. However,
there are a few examples, some happy, others not so happy, of
Italian literary texts turned into Hollywood movies. One is the
1963 United States-Italy co-production of Il Gattopardo
(The Leopard), directed by Luchino Visconti. A shortened,
dubbed version in Cinemascope and Deluxe Colour of poor standard
was released in the United States by Twentieth Century Fox. It
bore little resemblance to the unabridged Italian version, executed
with great care and attention to detail by Visconti. Yet the presence
of Burt Lancaster in the lead role of Fabrizio, Prince of Salina,
assured the movie a measure of commercial success; it also assured
Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa's novel (1958), first translated
in 1960, reissued in 1963 to coincide with the film's release
and several times since then, an English public.

Another example of Hollywood's infrequent forays into contemporary
Italian literature is Twentieth Century Fox's production of Eco's
The Name of the Rose, directed by the French Jean-Jacques
Annaud and starring the Englishman Sean Connery, a truly international
effort, worthy of a book translated into dozens of languages.
Yet in this case too the results were not completely happy. The
film received mixed reviews, the reactions ranging from "a
rich and beautiful film" and "visually impeccable and
royally entertaining" to "a plodding misfire . . . sorrowfully
mediocre". Moreover, it was negatively compared to the book:
"The rich, complex text of The Name of the Rose has
been profaned by the order of the crude brothers of Hollywood"
(O'Toole). Despite its lukewarm reception, the film did pretty
well commercially, in part because of Sean Connery's strong performance
in the role of the wily monk-sleuth William of Baskerville. But
the film's relative commercial success was mostly driven by the
book's overwhelming success, about ten million copies sold world-wide
to date. Here is an example where the "rebound effect"
is reversed. The book sold the film, created a climate of expectation
for its appearance and an audience to receive it. In the credits
the film is defined as a palimpsest of the book. It is, and as
such it is not a bad effort.

Italy's classic authors have not been entirely neglected by Hollywood.
The 1945 Universal Pictures This Love of Ours was loosely
based on Pirandello's Come prima, meglio di prima (1920);
it was remade ten years later as Never Say Goodbye. Neither
picture distinguished itself, nor enhanced Pirandello's reputation,
which, in any case, did not need enhancing. His continuing presence
abroad is on the stage, not on the screen. Ever since Milano-Film's
acclaimed 1909 production of the Inferno, directed by Giuseppe
De Liguoro, made its way across the Atlantic, Hollywood has been
fascinated by Dante. Dantesque allusions and imagery abound in
American movies, but no serious attempt has been made to transform
Dante's poem into a feature-length movie. Despite recent technological
advances, the cost of the special effects required to make a blockbuster
à la Spielberg is still prohibitive. In any case, the episodic
nature and textual characteristics of the Commedia make
it more suitable for television than for the movies. On this subject,
more in a moment. Nonetheless, there exists a Hollywood movie
entitled Dante's Inferno. Made in 1935 by Twentieth Century
Fox, it stars Spencer Tracy as a ruthless carnival owner who has
a vision of hell. The ten minute inferno sequence, in which hell
is reconstructed using drawings from Gustave Doré, is one
of the most extraordinary and imaginative pieces of cinema in
Hollywood's history.

b. Television: Literature in the Hands of the Timid Giant

In Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan subtitled
the chapter on movies "The Reel World," recalling Joyce's
pun on "reel" and "real". The chapter on television
he called "The Timid Giant", because he felt that the
medium had yet to unleash its power. Over the years the timid
giant has appropriated both the "reel" and the "real"
worlds. Even when a film is not financed, in part or in whole,
by television - a common practice these days - and shown first
on the small screen, it will eventually wind up there. This gives
the picture a second life - the literary text on which it is based
a third life, if it is a literary movie - and a potentially vast
audience. But there is a price to be paid. That price is the subject
of Maurizio Nichetti's Ladri di saponette (1989), The
Icicle Thief in America, where it has triumphed. Imagine Ladri
di biciclette on television with commercials. That, in essence,
is the plot of The Icicle Thief, except that in Nichetti's
film the two worlds - that of the story (a "remake"
of De Sica's classic, lovingly shot in sepia-toned black and white)
and that of the commercials in brilliant colour - become hopelessly
intertwined. All of this horrifies the director, who is in a television
studio being interviewed. Finally, the director (played by Nichetti
himself) must jump into his movie in a manner reminiscent of Pirandello
in order to set it back on track. From time to time the movie
takes us into a typical Italian home where the family seems to
be more interested in the commercials than in the film, and is
largely oblivious to the electronic mix-up. Nichetti's film is
a devastating but entertaining parody of the way film is treated
by television and the typical TV viewer. Billed "as the first
film that interrupts commercials," it was ironically itself
funded by Italian television. The timid giant has nothing to fear,
so powerful is his hold on the viewer.

At first glance, commercial television does not seem to be an
auspicious forum for serious cinema or literature. Ironically,
unimaginative educational television can be equally inhospitable
to literature. I am thinking in particular of the one-hundred
part series on Dante's Commedia, produced by the Dipartimento
Scuola Educazione of RAI TV, and shown on Channel Three in 1988.
The project was conceived in 1984. At the time there was a struggle
within the RAI corporation between those who wanted to produce
a high-budget blockbuster on the Inferno along the lines
of Giuliano Montaldo's recent successful adaptation of Marco Polo's
Milione and those who wanted to do something more academic.
Unfortunately, the latter group prevailed. I say unfortunately
because now we have been deprived of an epic on the Inferno
which might have been interesting. Instead we have gained a televised
lectura Dantis which is neither interesting nor particularly
useful.

The production is sensitive neither to the language of television
nor to the telepotential language of Dante's Commedia.
Dante's poem is neither writerly nor readerly, to use Barthes'
terminology in S/Z. Rather it is more like what Fiske,
in Television Culture, calls a "producerly" text.
A producerly text is polysemous and combines the easy accessibility
of the readerly with the complex discursive strategies of the
writerly. These peculiar textual qualities allow the poem to produce
meaning and pleasure in audiences which range from the uneducated
to the most sophisticated and discerning. Add to this its episodic
nature, and Dante's Commedia was made for television. RAI
missed a great opportunity. It is very unlikely that these programs
will ever circulate much outside Italy, either in a commercial
or an educational setting.

Fortunately, Dante produces television abroad too. The Media Centre
at the University of Toronto is making a series called Dante's
Divine Comedy: A Televisual Commentary. (I am personally involved
in this project.) So far two programs - one on Francesca, the
other on Ulysses - have been completed; more are on the way. Intended
for an undergraduate student audience, these programs reconstruct
televisually the iconography of damnation and salvation, which
the poem would have evoked in the minds of his contemporaries.
They do so using manuscript illuminations and various other visual
sources, all of which belong to Dante and his original public's
cultural patrimony and memory. Designed to complement not replace
the text, these programs have found a market in American colleges
and universities.

By far the most ambitious project to translate Dante from print
into video is A TV Dante, produced by Channel Four Television
in Britain. It will eventually consist of 34 episodes, one on
each canto of the Inferno. So far the first eight episodes
have been completed. The programs are directed by Tom Phillips
and Peter Greenaway. Tom Phillips is a well known experimental
artist, novelist, and maker of books. In 1983 he translated and
illustrated the Inferno. Peter Greenaway, of course, is
one of the foremost contemporary intellectual and experimental
filmmakers. He has written and directed several films, most recently
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, which is
full of Dantesque allusions, and Prospero'sBooks.

In different ways, the RAI and the University of Toronto programs
are philological in nature, driven by a desire to explicate the
poem. Phillips and Greenaway take the opposite approach and attempt
to make the past contemporary (Iannucci, "Dante Produces
Television"). Clearly, their response to Dante is creative
and this is explicitly stated from the very beginning. "The
good old text always is a blank for new things," says Tom
Phillips, who appears on screen at the start. Nonetheless, their
videos remain bound to Dante's text, which defines the terrain
within which meaning may be made. They skilfully use Dante's text
to experiment, at times parodically, with the "linguistic"
conventions of the medium. The result is an entertaining, postmodern
collage of televisual styles, an exercise which is not dissimilar
in spirit to Dante's conscious mixing of styles or plurilinguism
in the Commedia. A TV Dante was awarded first prize
at the Montreal International Film and Video Festival for the
best experimental video of 1990.

Between the butchered films on commercial television and the insipid
documentaries which characterize a great deal of educational television
programming, there is a middle ground where literature can thrive
on television. The British have found that ground, and here I
am referring not only to the splendid (but not flawless) A
TV Dante, but also to the BBC's serialized representation
of such literary works as Brideshead Revisited. Less spectacular
than RAI's Marco Polo, which had huge American backing
and was filmed in English, the BBC's serializations are perhaps
more respectful of the literary origin of the material and more
suitable to the structural preferences and the coolness of the
medium. (Television is at its best in the serial form; film is
not an ideal unit for television.) Nonetheless, RAI's eight-part
mini-series on Marco Polo was an international success
and had the effect of reproposing the Venetian's text, which has
long fascinated both East and West. Old translations of the work
were re-issued and new ones made, including one in modern Italian
by Maria Bellonci for ERI, complete with colour photographs from
the television extravaganza (1982). Two years later Bellonci's
modern Italian text was translated into English as The Travels
of Marco Polo. That same year Gary Jennings' huge historical
novel, The Journeyer, appeared. In it, the elderly Polo
completes his earlier account in a series of letters to Rustichello
Da Pisa. With the exception of Marco Polo, Italian television
has done little to transmit and promote its literary heritage
abroad, nor has it distinguished itself on the stage of the global
village.

In conclusion, the transcodification of Italian literary texts
from print into film or video generally provides these texts (albeit
altered) with a different and wider public. As popular media,
cinema and television reach an audience composed of many people
who would not normally read these works either in the original
Italian or in translation. However, their passage from one medium
into another radically transforms them. They become something
else, as Bassani soon realized and tried, in vain, to reverse.
In the case of television the transformation is especially dramatic
since the shift is from the archetypical literate mode of communication
(print) to an oral mode, even if, as Walter Ong points out in
Orality and Literacy, the "secondary orality"of
our electronic environment is in many respects different from
the traditional kind in that it is based and depends heavily on
literacy (136). There is a price to pay for a bigger, mass audience.
But literary works turned into movies or television series also
gain more readers, through what I have called the "rebound
effect." These works are usually republished or translated
(if a translation does not already exist), and hence become more
accessible. Wider diffusion does not, of course, assure continuing
popular and/or critical success. Ladri di biciclette is
a good example of this: as I noted, the film has supplanted the
novel as the cultural point of reference. The ultimate impact
and influence of a literary work (Italian or otherwise) depend
on its textual characteristics, on its ability to continue to
produce meaning and pleasure. Its translation into another language
or medium may give that work a boost but it is no sure sign of
textual staying power.